 In this video I'm going to show you how to make illuminance selection using the range mask tool inside a lightroom. What's up nerds? Welcome back to another tutorial. So glad to see you guys. My name is Adam. In the last tutorial I showed you how to make selections based on color. In this video I'm going to show you how to make selections based on brightness or darkness values. And so let's jump into lightroom. I've grabbed a photograph of my daughter Zoe and I've grabbed this picture because the value of brightness to darkness is really great. In other words, there's really bright sky in the background and then there's really, you know, dark shadows in the foreground in the in the front of the picture. And so this dynamic range is something that we can fix but we might run into some problems. So I think this will be a really good exercise to show you the power of this range mask tool. So let's go in here. The first thing that I need to do is I need to make a selection of the thing that it is I want to fix. Okay? And you can do this using the graduated filter, the radial tool or the adjustment brush. It really doesn't matter. I'm gonna go ahead and use the graduated filter just because this is a little bit easier. So I'm just gonna go ahead and pull down and then I'm gonna turn my overlay mask on hitting the letter O. So in this example, anything that's red has been selected. Okay? But if you look at it, right? I said that what I'm trying to fix is the sky. But when I use this tool, I also selected not only the sky, I selected, you know, the pumpkins in the background and the leaves in the tree and that kind of stuff. And I actually want to leave those details alone. I don't want to make changes to those. Maybe I do in a separate adjustment, but for this adjustment, I don't. I only want to affect the sky. And so this is where the range mask tool is gonna come into play because this is gonna allow us to decide what parts of this selection do I want to keep and what do I want to get rid of. So let's jump into the range mask tool, which is located right down here. Right now it says it's off, but I'm gonna turn it on. And instead of using color, I'm gonna use the luminance values. Now as soon as I make that selection, I get two little sliders that pop up. That's one of the things people love about Lightroom, right? Sliders. All you have to do is pull left, pull right. Work is done, which is awesome. So the first choice you want to make is you need to decide what range of lightness or darkness we want to keep. And I kind of think of this as what am I trying to protect? Do I want to protect the bright stuff or do I want to protect the dark stuff? Right now I want to protect the dark stuff because it's the bright stuff that I want to change. If it were in the reverse and I wanted to change the dark stuff, then I would be wanting to protect the bright stuff. Hopefully that makes some sense. But in this photograph, I want to protect the dark stuff and make changes to the bright stuff. That bright sky that's in the background. That's what I want to modify. So I'm gonna go to the range tool and I'm gonna start to pull on one of these little tabs here. If I were to go here and pull on this one and notice that the red in the sky goes away, well that was the opposite of what I actually wanted to do. No big deal. So I just put this back and I go and I pull on the other tab instead. So now when I start to do that, you'll notice that the trees begin to get protected and the sky stays red, which is what I wanted. Okay? So once you you select the range, the first part is done. The second thing we need to do is decide on where we want this smoothness value to go. Now before we jump into the smoothness, I'm gonna zoom into this picture and make some changes because it's gonna really make sense as to how this smooth slider works. So let me zoom in to Zoe here. And what I want you to pay attention to in particular is the area around her hair. Okay? So as I go ahead and I move this smooth slider side to side, okay? You'll see how the red in her face, we're still looking at the overlay mask, the red in her face starts to go away as I move this slider down. Okay? So I'm gonna just move it all the way down just because I want you to see what happens here. And then I'm gonna go make an adjustment to fix that bright sky. So if I go to the exposure and I start to pull exposure down, okay? What you're gonna notice is that there is a halo that is starting to creep in around her hair. And as I move the range tool or if I get too aggressive with the exposure adjustment, you'll see this halo around her head gets really, really strong. And that's bad. You don't want that haloing there. So this is where the smoothness slider comes in. I can go over to the smoothness and pull that smoothness back. And what that does is that makes that halo go away as you can see here. And so what you might find yourself doing between both images is jumping back and forth between the range slider and trying to tweak that and the smoothness slider and trying to tweak that just to make sure that the selection that you're getting is absolutely perfect. And then obviously you can kind of tweak the adjustment or whatever it is you were trying to do. And so if I zoom back out here and I turn that overlay mask off, you can see with the quick before and after what that's done here. Now I know that her face is a little dark and that's okay because what I was going for was what do we want the sky to look like. But in this example, if I didn't like what it did to her face and I could erase anything that I didn't like. So if I didn't like what it was doing to Zoe's face, I could just go in here and erase it. Perfect. So that's using the luminance slider. Just remember the luminance is all about selecting the exposure values, colors for selecting color. So between this video and the last video, you should be able to make any selection you really want to make. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. Leave comments down below. Comments, likes, subscribes, all that stuff is always welcome. And as always, thank you so much for watching. Have a great day, everybody.